Isabel’s voice dripped scorn. “Good thing, too, because you aren’t doing anything criminal. Stop freaking out, and do your book-boy thing. I need the receipt.”
I rang up her books and bagged them, glancing at the empty street every so often. My head was a jumbled-up mess of police uniforms, wolves in the woods, and voices I hadn’t heard for a decade.
As I handed her the bag, the old scars on my wrists throbbed with buried memories.
For a moment, Isabel looked like she was going to say something more, and then she just shook her head and said, “Some people are really not cut out for deception. See you later, Sam.”
CHAPTER TWO
• COLE • I have had no thought other than this: Stay alive.
And to have had only that thought, each day, was heaven.
We wolves ran through the sparse pine trees, our paws light on ground damp with the memory of snow.
We were so close together, shoulders bumping against one another, jaws snapping playfully, bodies ducking beneath and leaping over one another like fish in a river, that it was impossible to tell where one wolf began and another ended.
Moss rubbed to bare dirt and markings on trees guided us through the woods; I could smell the rotting, growing smell of the lake before I could hear water splashing. One of the other wolves sent out a quick image: ducks gliding smoothly onto the cold blue surface of the lake. From a second wolf: a deer and her fawn walking on trembling legs to get a drink.
For me, there was nothing beyond this moment, these traded images and this silent, powerful bond.
And then, for the first time in months, I suddenly remembered that, once, I’d had fingers.
I stumbled, falling out of the pack, my shoulders bunching and twitching. The wolves wheeled, some of them doubling back to encourage me to rejoin them, but I could not follow. I twisted on the ground, slimy spring leaves pasted to my skin, the heat of the day clogged in my nostrils.
My fingers turned over the fresh black earth, jamming it beneath nails suddenly too short to defend me, smearing it in eyes that now saw in brilliant color.
I was Cole again, and spring had come too soon.
CHAPTER THREE
• ISABEL • The day the cop came into the bookstore was the first day I had ever heard Grace complain of a headache. It probably doesn’t sound that remarkable, but since I met Grace, she had never mentioned so much as a runny nose. Also, I was something of an expert on headaches. They were a hobby of mine.
After watching Sam dance clumsily with the cop, I headed back to school, which by this stage in my life had become sort of redundant. The teachers didn’t really know what to do with me, caught as they were between my good grades and my terrible attendance record, so I got away with a lot. Our uneasy agreement basically came down to this: I’d come to class and they’d let me do what I wanted to do, as long as I didn’t corrupt the other students.
So the first thing I did when I got to Computer Arts was dutifully log in to my computer station and undutifully pull out the books I’d bought that morning.
One of them was an illustrated encyclopedia of diseases—fat, dusty-smelling, and bearing a copyright of 1986. The thing was probably one of the first books The Crooked Shelf had stocked. While Mr. Grant outlined what we were supposed to be doing, I flipped through the pages, looking for the most gruesome images. There was a photograph of someone with porphyria, someone else with seborrheic dermatitis, and an image of roundworms in action that made my stomach turn over, surprising me.
Then I flipped to the M section. My fingers ran down the page to meningitis, bacterial. The back of my nose stung as I read the entire section. Causes.
Symptoms. Diagnosis. Treatment. Prognosis. Mortality rate of untreated bacterial meningitis: 100 percent.
Mortality rate of treated bacterial meningitis: 10 to 30 percent.
I didn’t need to look it up; I already knew the stats.
I could’ve recited the whole entry. I knew more than this 1986 encyclopedia of diseases did, too, because I had read all the online journals about the newest treatments and unusual cases.
The seat next to me creaked as someone sat down; I didn’t bother to close the book as she rolled over in her chair. Grace always wore the same perfume. Or, knowing Grace, used the same shampoo.
“Isabel,” Grace said, in a relatively low voice —other students were chattering now as the project was under way. “That’s positively morbid—even for you.”
“Bite me,” I replied.
“You need therapy.” But she said it lightly.
“I’m getting it.” I looked up at her. “I’m just trying to find out how meningitis worked. I don’t think it’s morbid. Don’t you want to know how Sam’s little problem worked?”
Grace shrugged and turned back and forth in the swivelback chair, her dark blond hair falling across her flushed cheeks as she dropped her gaze to the floor.
She looked uncomfortable. “It’s over now.”
“Sure,” I said.
“If you’re going to be cranky, I’m not going to sit next to you,” Grace warned. “I don’t feel good, anyway.
I’d rather be home.”
“I just said ‘sure,’” I said. “That’s not cranky, Grace.
Believe me, if you want me to bring out the inner—”
“Ladies?” Mr. Grant appeared at my shoulder and looked at my blank screen and Grace’s black one.
“Last time I checked, this was a Computer Arts class, not a social hour.”
Grace looked up earnestly at him. “Do you think I could go to the nurse? My head—I think I have a sinus thing coming on or something.”
Mr. Grant looked down at her pink cheeks and pensive expression, and nodded his permission. “I want a note back from the office,” he told her, after Grace thanked him and stood up. She didn’t say anything to me as she left, just knocked on the back of my chair with her knuckles.
“And you—” Mr. Grant said. Then he dropped his gaze down to the encyclopedia and its still-open page, and he never finished his sentence. He just nodded, as if to himself, and walked away.
I turned back to my extracurricular study of death and disease. Because no matter what Grace thought, I knew that in Mercy Falls, it’s never over.
CHAPTER FOUR
• GRACE • By the time Sam got home from the bookstore that evening, I was making New Year’s resolutions at the kitchen table.
I’d been making New Year’s resolutions ever since I was nine. Every year on Christmas, I’d sit down at the kitchen table under the dim yellow light, hunched over in a turtleneck sweater because of the draft from the glass door to the deck, and I’d write my goals for the year in a plain black journal I’d bought for myself.
And every year on Christmas Eve, I’d sit down in the exact same place and open the exact same book to a new page and write down what I’d accomplished in the previous twelve months. Every year, the two lists looked identical.
Last Christmas, though, I hadn’t made any resolutions. I’d spent the month trying not to look through the glass door at the woods, trying not to think about the wolves and Sam. Sitting at the kitchen table and planning for the future had seemed like a cruel pretense more than anything else.
But now that I had Sam and a new year, that black journal, shelved neatly next to my career books and memoirs, haunted me. I had dreams about sitting at the kitchen table in a turtleneck sweater, dreams where I kept on writing and writing my resolutions without ever filling the page.